Black Canadian Info Sources
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In reply to:
Re: Canadian Dorsey Info
11/01/99
Stephen:
I haven't been back to this forum until today, and saw your reply.
You might want to try some of these sites:
- http://www.thebaltimoreblackpgs.com/http://www.thebaltimoreblackpgs.com/ - from Baltimore, MD
Black Loyalist Heritage Society, P.O. Box 1194, Shelburne, Nova Scotia, CANADAB0W 1W0 - Tel: TOLL-FREE 1-888-354-0772 or (902) 875-1310 FAX: (902) 875-1352 E-Mail: - [email protected] - a new organization in the 1990’s which has set up computerized files of 1000’s of black families and their ties with Colonial America and Canada.
Shelburne, NS in 1785 had the largest urban population in all of North America, when up to 20,000 Loyalists arrived from the USA. The white “gentlemen farmers” brought with them both indentured black servants and black slaves who were later freed (England abolished slavery in 1832). Unfortunately, these farmers quickly found that much of Nova Scotia was NOT suited to farming; they were given heavily wooded land with thin acidic soil, with lots of granite just below the surface. Many of the whites soon left for next door New Brunswick, or continued into the Eastern Townships of Québec (south side of St Lawrence River, north of New England) or Ontario, which had vast stretches of flat rich farmland along the St Lawrence between Montréal and York (later named Toronto).
Some black servants and freed men elected to stay in NS, while others arranged to go with their masters to Québec or Ontario. The ones who stayed in NS were subject to the same bigotry and discrimination they had left in the USA, and were given marginally productive lands outside the major towns - out of sight, out of mind. This is how black communities like Birchtown, Gibson Woods, and Inglisville came into being.
“The Book of Negroes” - a list of African Americans who had escaped slavery to fight with the British during the American Revolution. The list was prepared because George Washington demanded British compensation for lost slaves. “The Book of
Negroes” was a British inspection roll of former slaves who were granted certificates to board ships in New York. The rolls record the name, age and description of every black passenger, including their former masters and where they lived.
Villoy Mitchell-Dorrington - [email protected] - on November 25, 1997 was searching for anyone doing research on anyone who originated in Sierra Leone, who became part of the LAWRENCE and DAYE families from Guysborough County, New Glasgow, Pictou County, Halifax, Dartmouth, NS etc.
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- http://www.herald.ns.cahttp://www.herald.ns.ca - The Halifax Herald Limited, main daily newspaper in NS, has an on-line file of black history and other newspaper articles from its files gathered here since 1997. NOTE: You need to subscribe to the Herald to fully access these pages of information.
Here is one such article:
Saturday, October 30, 1999 - The Halifax Herald Limited
Lost history found - Nova Scotia is finally uncovering the origins of its black people By James Brooke / The New York Times
Birchtown, Shelburne County - As a mechanic with the Canadian Army, Everett S. Cromwell traveled the world. But as a black man born in Nova Scotia, a wind-blown Atlantic province typically associated with Gaelic cod fishermen, he recalled, “I never had a clue where we actually came from.”
The mystery of his family's past lifted when investigators from a new provincial black history project showed him “The Book of Negroes" - a list of African Americans who had escaped slavery to fight with the British during the American Revolution.
Reviewing this list, prepared because George Washington demanded British compensation for lost slaves, he said, "We discovered that Cromwells, our ancestors, disembarked here."
This tiny village, where Cromwell now routinely strolls along a quiet cove, was once the largest settlement of free blacks outside of Africa. A boomtown in the late 18th century, it was named after Samuel Birch, a British general. He issued Birch Certificates, the prized traveling papers that allowed black men and women to escape, via New York, to freedom in Nova Scotia. After two centuries of neglect bordering on denial, Nova Scotia now is unearthing its black American history.
In Halifax, a 250-year-old city dotted with museums celebrating white colonial history, Nova Scotia Museum researchers recently won a $114,000 federal grant to research black history. A black history slide show has toured traditionally black communities.
“Loyalties”, a new movie on the 18th century black migration, was on national television in mid-September.
“There was collective amnesia, no memory, no stories,” said Carmelita Robertson, a museum researcher who brought the slide show to Tracadie, the historically black community where she was born. “There was only a very superficial knowledge that people were slaves, and came up from the states on boats.”
Here in Birchtown, archaeologists have dug into the cellar hole of Stephen Blucke, a colonel in the Black Brigade, a British unit that waged guerrilla war against rebels in New Jersey.
Digging 200 yards from Cromwell's house last year, they found a rich trove of 16,000 artifacts, including Revolutionary War era military buttons, a shoe buckle and a bayonet.
Nearby, at Shelburne, people of African descent telephone daily from across Canada, and increasingly, from the United States, to register with Teena Paynter, registrar of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, a new genealogical project.
Ms. Robertson, who has traveled to South Carolina to meet lost family members, said, "To find these missing cousins can only enrich families. For black Americans, they possibly do have relatives who escaped north during slave times."
“The Book of Negroes”, which the Nova Scotia Museum hopes to post on the Internet soon, is considered a rare and valuable document for black history. It was produced 80 years before Emancipation in the United States and contains 2,700 surnames of escaped slaves, including names, ages, appearances, previous owners and places of residence.
Although the British compiled the lists and rebel inspectors boarded each ship to verify passenger manifests, the British never paid the compensation demanded by the man who would become the first U.S. President.
For people of African origin, about five per cent of Canada's population, uncovering the saga of the black loyalists has proved to be both uplifting and dispiriting. Those who went over to British lines in the late 1770s were not monarchists, but freedom-seekers, their descendants say.
"When they fought the Americans for the British, as far as they were concerned, they were fighting for their freedom," said Cromwell, a 77-year-old veteran who fought alongside U.S. units in Europe in World War II.
During the American Revolution, in a strategy they repeated in the war of 1812, British commanders offered freedom to slaves of rebel masters who would come over to fight with the British Army. The offer was not valid for slaves of loyalist masters. As a result, thousands of African-Americans fled slavery, and crossed over to British lines, where they often worked digging trenches and building gun emplacements.
In the chaos following the British military collapse, some officers enriched themselves through betrayal. When African-Americans got out to the high seas, they found that their ships were heading south to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, instead of north to freedom in Nova Scotia.
But at Birch's insistence, about 3,500 free black veterans were evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783 and 1784. The policy resulted from a mix of compassion and realpolitik. Determined to hold on to Canada, the British populated Nova Scotia with people hostile to the American Revolution - decommissioned British soldiers, white Tories and black loyalists.
On arriving here, freed blacks encountered a wall of racism. White authorities apparently wanted cheap labour. Within two years, surveyors had allotted farming plots to virtually all white arrivals but to fewer than 15 per cent of the blacks. White plots averaged twice the size of the black plots, which were often on thin, rocky soil distant from town.
Without the promised land, tools, or food rations, desperate black workers became indentured servants or accepted reduced wage rates. In 1784, the lowering of wage scales by black labourers prompted North America's first modern race riot, in Shelburne. Benjamin Marston, a surveyor, wrote: "Great riot today. The disbanded soldiers have risen against the free negroes to drive them out of town."
Two winters later, famine hit black communities. In 1788, a royal adviser visited Birchtown and reported of the black loyalists: “Their huts are miserable to guard against the Nova Scotia winter. I think I never saw such wretchedness and poverty.”
With black communities bitterly calling this cold, rocky province "Nova Scarcity”, residents and church leaders responded enthusiastically in 1791 to a plan by a London philanthropist to create a free black colony on the west coast of Africa. In January 1792, 1,196 free blacks set sail from Halifax for Sierra Leone, where they helped to establish the capital city, now Freetown.
“In Sierra Leone, they are still called the Nova Scotians, although they really are African-Americans,” Joe Opala, an American anthropologist, said of Freetown's founding families. Through research into 18th century shipping records, scholars have determined that about 50 of those who moved to Freetown were actually West Africans who had been kidnapped from their villages for the slave trade.
In modern Nova Scotia, the rediscovery of history has enhanced the self-esteem of the province's long-isolated black minority of 18,000 people. Still, recognition remains slow. Ms. Robertson says that, 216 years after her ancestors settled here, white Nova Scotians still assume she just arrived from the Caribbean asking, "what island I am from."
Here in Birchtown, Elizabeth Cromwell, Everett Cromwell's wife, was locked in negotiations one afternoon with donors for a proposed black history center. "All our history was shut off, as if we never existed," Cromwell recalled of growing up black in Nova Scotia. "We just want to put ourselves on the map, to show that we weren't born on a rock."
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Re: Black Canadian Info Sources
Reginald H. Pitts 1/21/00